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The problem with Flutter is Dart. I considered it for a cross-platform project for my company, but ruled it out because it uses a language that essentially nobo

The problem with Flutter is Dart. I considered it for a cross-platform project for my company, but ruled it out because it uses a language that essentially nobody knows. And when I say nobody, remember that the real world (and the contractors available in it) is not Hacker News. I wish Google would settle on a language or two and stop with the seemingly endless parade of new ones. Kotlin for mobile, and ? for everything else. Or just... Kotlin.

pohuing 4y ago
Fortunately dart is fairly predicatable. It does few special things and they're all very approachable for anyone familiar with the other gc'ed oop languages(java, c# etc.). While I wish it had some more useful features, its mundanity was a big boon when picking it up.
karmakaze 4y ago
The main reason for Kotlin's recent popularity is from its use on Android. Not that long ago it wasn't all that popular while many jvm better-than-java languages were competing. Same for Go. If a substantial amount of Android (or other/cross-platform) dev happens with Flutter, Dart will become just as common. As a language, it's not great, but it's also not bad either.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Except the little detail that Android team couldn't care less about Dart/Flutter, it isn't even part of the official Android SDK. Jake Wharton has a few rants about the Fluter/Dart vs Android politics.
- lchengify 4y ago
  It's true that Kotlin wasn't a breakout success 5 years ago. However, I would argue Kotlin's design decisions made it destined for its current success, whereas Dart has not. The most obvious of this was same-build compatibility with Java. Mixing Kotlin and Java made it super easy to switch, and made using it a no-brainer vs other solutions. Android Studio also has a button that auto-converts Java to Kotlin, so in many cases a wholesale rewrite isn't even necessary. At this point, Kotlin has also become a goto for backend Java for stream processing and other open-source JVM projects. It's rapidly replacing things like Scala for Flink, as an example. Maybe Dart survives by the sheer force of will of Flutter, but I don't think there's a chance it catches Kotlin.
  - ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
    Kotlin also seems very similar to Swift, which is handy. The last time I saw the topic debated on this site, the consensus was that native is still the best way to go when developing mobile apps, even when you have to support both iOS and Android.
    - karmakaze 4y ago
      By native on Android you mean the 'widgets' APIs meaning Kotlin is fine (not the NDK with C/C++) I assume.
CrimsonRain 4y ago
It takes an hour at most to grasp most of dart if you know java/typescript. The problem with flutter is lack of high quality libraries. Jank. And finally, flutter web not being good enough yet.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
  Thanks. I don't know Javascript or Typescript, and nobody else among our developers did either. I know Swift and C++, and our products' firmware and other software is written in C++. It's not that grasping it would be hard. It's just that nobody has time to dick around with it and making tooling for it. We ended up using Qt and constructing the UI in QML, which worked out quite well for a cross-platform desktop app. Still haven't tried mobile with it.

pohuing 4y ago

Fortunately dart is fairly predicatable. It does few special things and they're all very approachable for anyone familiar with the other gc'ed oop languages(java, c# etc.). While I wish it had some more useful features, its mundanity was a big boon when picking it up.

karmakaze 4y ago

The main reason for Kotlin's recent popularity is from its use on Android. Not that long ago it wasn't all that popular while many jvm better-than-java languages were competing. Same for Go. If a substantial amount of Android (or other/cross-platform) dev happens with Flutter, Dart will become just as common. As a language, it's not great, but it's also not bad either.

pjmlp 4y ago
Except the little detail that Android team couldn't care less about Dart/Flutter, it isn't even part of the official Android SDK. Jake Wharton has a few rants about the Fluter/Dart vs Android politics.
lchengify 4y ago
It's true that Kotlin wasn't a breakout success 5 years ago. However, I would argue Kotlin's design decisions made it destined for its current success, whereas Dart has not. The most obvious of this was same-build compatibility with Java. Mixing Kotlin and Java made it super easy to switch, and made using it a no-brainer vs other solutions. Android Studio also has a button that auto-converts Java to Kotlin, so in many cases a wholesale rewrite isn't even necessary. At this point, Kotlin has also become a goto for backend Java for stream processing and other open-source JVM projects. It's rapidly replacing things like Scala for Flink, as an example. Maybe Dart survives by the sheer force of will of Flutter, but I don't think there's a chance it catches Kotlin.
- ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
  Kotlin also seems very similar to Swift, which is handy. The last time I saw the topic debated on this site, the consensus was that native is still the best way to go when developing mobile apps, even when you have to support both iOS and Android.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    By native on Android you mean the 'widgets' APIs meaning Kotlin is fine (not the NDK with C/C++) I assume.

CrimsonRain 4y ago

It takes an hour at most to grasp most of dart if you know java/typescript. The problem with flutter is lack of high quality libraries. Jank. And finally, flutter web not being good enough yet.

ShadowBanThis01 4y ago
Thanks. I don't know Javascript or Typescript, and nobody else among our developers did either. I know Swift and C++, and our products' firmware and other software is written in C++. It's not that grasping it would be hard. It's just that nobody has time to dick around with it and making tooling for it. We ended up using Qt and constructing the UI in QML, which worked out quite well for a cross-platform desktop app. Still haven't tried mobile with it.